Talking with Daniel Debow about using Rypple to open the Johari Window

On this week’s Innovators show, with Daniel Debow of Rypple, I learned about a cognitive psychological tool called the Johari Window. Rypple focuses on the quadrant of the Johari Window at the intersection of “known to others” and “not known to self” — the so-called blind area. The company is dedicated to the proposition that if we can become more aware of what others know about us that we don’t, we can improve ourselves along various axes: personal, social, and — critically for Rypple’s business model — professionally.

How do you gain that awareness? By asking questions like:

Am I giving sufficiently clear guidance?

or

Do I interrupt people too often?

You direct these questions to a set of people whose feedback you value. Rypple anonymizes their responses and, to the extent you buy into the service, provides a progressively capable framework within which to continue the dialogue. This is a great idea, and one of the very few appropriate uses for online anonymity that I can imagine.

Rypple, as a company, lives at the intersection of a couple of key trends. Social media, obviously, but also the services ecosystem. As we discuss in the podcast, corporate HR has historically been a monolith that expects 100% compliance with its systems. But people, as we know, differ emotionally and cognitively. We should be able to use a variety of methods to manage and evaluate people, and help them manage and evaluate themselves. Software delivered as a service is an enabler of that possibility.

Here’s a twist: A company won’t have access to the feedback that employees solicit using Rypple. Daniel Debow says that HR folks, well aware of mainstream social software, are ready to embrace this model. I hope he’s right.

His favorite recent story about Rypple goes like this:

At an HR conference I talked to the CEO of a company that uses Rypple. He’s excited about what we’re doing, but he said: “You have a real problem. Use of your system might make your system obselete. We’ve been using it for a while now, and I’ve noticed that people are much more willing to give me feedback face-to-face, they’re willing to talk to me.”

Well that’s the furthest thing from a problem I can imagine. It’s like saying to Facebook, you’ve got a problem, people keep meeting on Facebook and then meeting up in person and creating real relationships offline.

Actually that would be problem for Facebook. But Rypple isn’t about pageviews, it’s about helping people improve. Which seems like a great idea to me.

You can, by the way, use Rypple not only to solicit anonymized feedback from a chosen set of responders, but also from an open-ended set. So here’s my question:

But that’s not really the sweet spot for Rypple. The feedback is valuable, but none of the folks who’ve responded through that channel are relying on anonymity to tell me things I might not otherwise want to hear.

So I’ve been thinking about the set of folks to whom I’d like to specifically address a request for feedback. Which turns out to be a fascinating exercise in itself.